Eager to return home for the holidays, GOP leaders in the House and their counterparts in the Senate rushed out a budget agreement that's stingy enough to put the Grinch to shame. They agreed on a budget that doles out $39.7 billion in cuts over five years, including spending reductions for Medicaid and Medicare, child support enforcement, foster care, welfare system benefits and student loans.

The changes to the welfare program, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), are particularly offensive because the House Republicans sneaked them into the bill. Normally, changes to welfare rules are debated and voted on as separate bills, and the changes snuck into this bill have been defeated four years in a row.

These changes include stricter requirements forced on states to increase participation in welfare-to-work programs without adequate federal funding to do so. They require a steep hike in work, training and community service hour requirements The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the cost to states of meeting the proposed work requirements is at least $8.4 billion over the next five years.

Struggling single mothers will need to spend more time away from their children, even though lawmakers neglected to adequately increase funding for the childcare needed to support this. The CBO has estimated states need $12 billion over the next five years to meet the new work requirements and ensure that the funding keeps pace with inflation. Yet the bill before the Senate currently allows for only $1 billion in childcare funding. The National Women's Law Center calculates that 330,000 children in low-income working families that are not on welfare would lose their childcare assistance by 2010.

As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has reported, the number of children in deep poverty is likely to rise. That's because states will try to cope with the federal mandates by reducing the number of families who get help by imposing new obstacles to needy families seeking help.

The Senate passed its own version of a budget-cutting bill earlier in November and it decried the cuts that now face it in this budget-cutting bill. The Senate had cut only Medicaid, the health care program for the poor, disabled and low-income seniors. Importantly, those cuts were exacted from insurance and pharmaceutical industries rather than from the needy beneficiaries of the program.

In contrast, the new bill includes close to $5 billion cuts to Medicaid that come from an increase in co-payments and premiums paid by beneficiaries and increased eligibility requirements. Medicaid premiums for beneficiaries are raised. Student loan programs are cut by almost $13 billion.

Heartless slashing of the food stamp program, originally included in the budget legislation, was left out of the final version that awaits the Senate's vote. Aside from the nearly $70 billion in tax cuts to the rich that House Republicans passed earlier this month, the elimination of Food Stamps cuts is the only ornament on this weedy "Christmas Tree."

The Senate is currently debating this bill and a vote is expected as soon as today.

It's going to be extremely close, possibly a 50-50 split between yeas and neas. Vice President Dick Cheney has been recalled early from his trip overseas in anticipation of casting the tie-breaking favorable vote. His hasty return may be in vain because some more of the Republican moderates may not simply hold their noses and vote "yes," but will instead either put the vote off until after Christmas, or vote "no" and send it back to the House to try again. If the Republicans get their way, a significant, indeed growing, portion of this country's population will have to face a new year of increased hardship.

-- Karen Dolan is a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and Research Director of its project, Cities for Progress.